My experience shows that starting a new campaign requires two to four hours of keyphrase research. Then, it takes 4 to 8 hours - a full day's work - to come up with a few ads to try out. You must also decide how to group each keyphrase. Actually going on Google to start the campaign doesn't take very long, about 20 minutes on average if you've done it a few times before.

Then there is the monitoring of your ad(s). This has to be a daily ritual, seven days a week. And the more campaigns you run, the more time it takes. But you can´t get around it. You must record every little detail of the campaign, your site´s log files and any change you make to your site. That is the only way you can make informed decisions on what to do next. If you don´t know what´s going on, how are you going to make improvements?

The beauty of PPC is that it is real-time but it is very time consuming.

I also spend time analyzing the numbers to see if I can do better. What would be the point of gathering all this information if it´s just going to sit there? I try to peer deep into the numbers and answer many questions such as: Is my ad bringing in as many surfers as it could? Is the ad itself losing its effectiveness? What's my ranking been like this past week?

There are decisions to be made. Should I increase my cost per click or try a different ad? This takes another 30 minutes and there goes the first hour of the day. One hour of a "standard" 8-hour work day (as a small business owner, you should know there is no such thing as a standard 8-hour work day) is 12.5 percent of your time. Even if you put in 10 hours into your business every day, that is still ten percent of your time spent on marketing on Google only.

How much is this time worth?

As an information technology professional, my time is worth a minimum $25 per hour. Therefore, the worth of my time I put into a PPC advertising campaign is at least $9,125 every year (365 times a minimum of one hour per day times $25).

So to pay someone say $2,000 per year to manage my campaign would be worth the trouble. I gain an extra hour every day to do what I really am good at and like to do, namely design computer applications, not trying to be a marketing expert. Not that trying to create a PPC campaign has been a waste - I have learned a lot from it. It´s just that I can make much better use of my time in doing what I was trained for. You´d rather have your doctor practice and get better and learn more about the latest medicine techniques than you want him spending his time with insurance claims. That´s why he has a secretary to do that.

The time I spend away from my PPC campaign is extra money in my pocket. Instead of running my campaign, I can get an extra client, close to an extra $10,000 per year. The net result is if I pay a service $2,000, that is an extra $8,000 in profit. All this because of one hour saved per day.

But remember that using a service does not guarantee results. You may make the same amount of sales you were before except that now you are spending more. There are a few services who guarantee a higher CTR. Would a higher CTR actually result in more sales? Logic would say yes but that is not always the case. It will depend on the reason behind the higher rate. Only you can answer that as it is your business and you should know it better than anyone else.

Here´s an example. I know of a service that guarantees at least a ten percent more clicks on existing campaigns. Say they charge $500 per year. In our above example, that would mean a CTR of at least 4.4% which would mean 1,460 new clicks ($73 minimum). If your ROI is 10:1, you just made $730 more, a net profit of $230. But if your ROI is a more typical 5:1, you have made $365 more in sales that cost you $500 for this particular service, a losing proposition.

I believe that campaign management services have a place in this world. It is not however for everyone. Here are guidelines in deciding: